Beating victim’s mother wants slaying solved

She knows her 24-year-old son Devon Wallace of Alexandria, Va., made a call to his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his young son, sometime after 7 on the evening of May 1.

“He said the charge on his phone was almost out,” she said in an interview this week. “He said he’d call back.”

Webb said that Wallace and his current girlfriend had been out for the day when they began to argue and she drove off around 5 p.m. She said he may have said he was in Frederick, Md.

“That’s all we know until his body was spotted Thursday morning,” Webb said. “Somebody killed him and dragged his body out there in the field. He was thrown out like a bag of trash.”

Webb, who also lives in Alexandria, says Sgt. Steven Holz and others with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office are doing a good job working to nail down what happened in the hours before a driver caught sight of Wallace’s body in a field about half a mile west of South Jefferson Elementary School.

She said she’s eager to see justice done for her youngest child, who had worked as a Dollar Tree assistant manager, in restaurants, helping to remodel homes and in other jobs. He also was the father of a 5-year-old in kindergarten, a son he adored.

“My son was beaten to death by someone while someone else was holding him down,” she said. “Somebody knows something or maybe saw something. I hope they will call and make a report.”

Webb said she also hopes that DNA tests direct police to the people responsible for her son’s slaying.

“I understand there’s a backlog and DNA tests can take six or even nine months or longer to come back,” she said. “I’m praying this evidence testing can be expedited so that we will know who the killer is. Who the killers are.”

Webb doesn’t know of any connection that Wallace, who grew up in Alexandria as well as in Hampton, Va., had to Jefferson County.

“I don’t think the crime happened there,” she said. “He doesn’t have any family in West Virginia at all. I think he was killed somewhere else and then brought out there because the killers wanted to throw off the police.”

Webb said police in Jefferson County are sharing information with their counterparts in Fairfax County, Va., and elsewhere. “They have been working around the clock,” she said.

Wallace’s body was sent to the state Medical Examiner’s Office in Charleston for an autopsy and Webb says a GoFundMe has been set up to raise the money for a funeral and burial.

“He did not deserve this,” Webb said. “He was a terrific father who wanted the best for his son. He would do anything for his son. He was just a good person.”

Webb said Wallace loved to cook and hoped to become a chef. “He’s struggled and had hard times just like any young person,” she said. “But he was never the type to be mean-spirited. He was the kind of kid and the kind of adult who, if he saw somebody in the street, he’d bring them home. He always wanted to help out if he could.”

Webb said she knows West Virginia doesn’t have the death penalty, but she’d like to see her son’s killers arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

She also wants some answers.

“That’s what I’m looking forward to – to look them in the eye and ask, ‘Why?’ I want to know how could someone beat him so viciously, bash his skull in and then just leave him out in a field like an animal.”

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